


Without Eurydice

by Zabbers



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Cutting, Other, Self-Harm, Suicidal Ideation, falling, post-apocalyptic Gallifreyan landscape, regeneration chicken
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-21
Updated: 2020-06-21
Packaged: 2021-03-04 01:40:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24835522
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zabbers/pseuds/Zabbers
Summary: The Doctor did find the Master in the ruins of Gallifrey.
Relationships: The Doctor/The Master (Doctor Who), Thirteenth Doctor/The Master (Dhawan)
Comments: 18
Kudos: 35





	Without Eurydice

They’re running again across the ruined red rockscape of Gallifrey. Which one is chasing, who is being chased is unclear and irrelevant. 

Is it a nightmare, is this the Matrix, are they dead? 

If only.

The Doctor’s footfalls call across the gravel. Parched stone skitters, scatters, shatters, weak at the fault, crumbling into the chasms below. The sound of the scree draws a picture, and the Master follows the picture until the Doctor’s a splash of incongruous colour in the unrelenting rubble, a scrap of fabric, a flash of bright hair, the shock of plumage of a pale soft bird clinging to a cliff. Then, smoke blows through the valley and she’s lost in its screen.

The Master climbs against the endlessly falling mountain: up, across, forward; he’ll get to her if he keeps moving, or she’ll get to him, and then together they can get to the end of all this. It’s the only thing left.

His foot catches on loose rock and disturbs uprooted plant matter, ash in the branched and clinging shape of something once living. He slips. The face of the mountain shears away, and he’s sliding with it, dirt in his eyes, blood in his mouth. With a roar of forced effort he scythes his arms through the air. His fingers land on solid stone. He grips, claws, makes his hands into anchors; his nails fill with the sandstone sharding and powdering under the weight of his momentum. His legs slam into the hollow the landslip left behind.

“That’s the difference between us,” he says conversationally, as though the Doctor can hear his words. “You would have just fallen.”

Just fallen. Just got up. Just walked away.

The Master pulls himself to safety, a little at a time.

Safety? He lies along the ledge and peers down into the abyss. He could have been crushed: bones splintered, sticking up through skin, great big gashes across his cheeks and his back and his chest. He could have been broken, he could have been buried, he could have been beautiful, the Doctor coming to stand above him, to watch him, expressionless, while he bowed to the thing that made him and let the light take him; loathe it as he might, or as he will; loathe it as he _must_.

O Gallifrey, o progenitors, o homeland! 

Look what you’ve made me do.

She falls, and still she stands above. Gallifrey burns, and still, life burns in him.

He lifts himself to a crawl. From the crawl, he crouches in the dust, his hands on his thighs, his head over his knees, spine curled, shoulders hunched, huddled and waiting for the will to straighten and stagger to his feet.

Come on, come on. Get up. Get up. He won’t let her find him like this. He won’t let her stand above him.

He climbs on and on.

Around and around, outside the Citadel, circling the shining city. How he had loved to watch its lights from the terrace outside his window. What solace for his eyes to trace the familiar shape of the ring valley, span its spoked bridges, to rise into the spires and summits and rest on the perfect translucent sphere protecting it all. How he had loved to stand secure at the top of that tallest spire and look back at the deep and dusk-red mountains, layer beyond layer, hue fading into distance, distance greying into haze, and glimpse in those boundless surrounding arms his home. 

Black ruins now. Crashing towers. Smoke from fires that will never go out.

“I didn’t mean to,” he whispers, “but I’m glad I did.”

Their chase spirals inward, until, before he expects it, in the outskirts of the city proper, he turns a corner and finds the Doctor. 

She’s holding her hand close to her chest, wrist in, fingers up. He grabs it before she can conceal it from him. She’s cut her palm. Blood is trickling downwards towards her sleeve.

“I thought I’d find you here,” she says. “I hoped— How did you escape? How did you get here?”

For two questions that don’t deserve an answer, the Master exchanges two that will never have one. “How many times have you left me behind to an impossible escape? How many times have you turned away? If you’d ever bothered to look back, you might have kept me trapped.”

The Doctor darkens. “Don’t say I haven’t tried not turning away.”

The Master smiles and gestures all around them. “Do you like it?” He hasn’t let go of her hand.

She shakes her head. “No. You don’t get to believe that this is because I wanted to make you better.”

“It isn’t.” He feels the animation fall from him. “But you shouldn’t have.”

He squeezes her wrist, twists her palm up so they can both see it. “What is this?”

“It’s nothing. A cut. I stumbled. A piece of glass.”

The Master narrows his eyes, though he lets her go. She backs away, not stepping—just swaying. 

He’s on her in an instant. But when he moves, she takes that step, and he’s the one who stumbles, down on one knee, a leg giving, his hand out to break his fall. He feels the sting of the scrape on his skin. The impact of a stone, sharp-edged, against his knee. He gapes down at it. Recently fractured. A piece of a building. Rubble. He’s damaged himself on his own destruction. 

“You’re unsteady on your feet,” the Doctor remarks. He cranes his neck to look at her. She’s got her hands behind her back, smug, practically rocking along her soles. 

“It wasn’t easy, getting away from the Kasaavin.”

“You never did know how to choose your friends.”

“And you’re putting yourself forward as the prime example.”

The Doctor furrows her brow, the picture of uncomprehending concern. “Your message…”

“Been here a lot since that first time, never moving past the doorway of your TARDIS.”

“You were watching me?”

“That’s one thing about the Kasaavin. They’re everywhere even when they’re nowhere. I have been watching you. Didn’t you ever feel eyes on you, a presence behind the debris you wouldn’t dare to investigate, something on the edge of your vision, melting into shadow before you could catch it?”

He sees the shiver behind her eyes. “That was you?”

He wants her to think so, but… “Sometimes. Not always.” He needs someone else to reify his unease, that feeling that the booming absence is not really absence, that, masked by the sound of the collapse of the shell of their civilisation, the mental silence is not quite complete. He wants her to see the ghosts. His ghosts. 

Or he just wants her to guess at where he’s stashed the bodies. 

The Doctor raises her face to the looming, smouldering darkness. The Master draws himself close behind her. He puts his mouth by her ear. “I think it’s haunted.”

“I think you’re mad.”

“The War couldn’t do this. The Daleks couldn’t do this. Not even you, not really. But I…”

She turns to him, waiting. Staring. So close, he can see the memory of lines on her face, the echo of the burden of years in her eyes. Somewhere under there is the Doctor who cared, as though the Master was carving something out of him, when she’d declined to die with him for a handful of mayfly nobodies, a wasted cause. Whose half-taken step had been like that of someone helpless before a plunder.

Somewhere inside him, there’s a Master who cares that she’ll never know she turned back, too late, and lay futile on the forest floor only a field and a hillock away, her face greying with the hot snow of his ashes. 

He shakes his head, clearing cobwebs. He brings his thumb and forefinger together. “It’s about balance. Symmetry. About the perfect placement of the fulcrum of our lives. It’s the mirror but it’s also the smashing of the mirror. And you love to break established orders.”

He turns his hand into an offer. “Smash this one with me.”

“I don’t know what it is you want me to do.”

“Die,” he says, and this time when he reaches for her, he doesn’t miss. He slams his body into hers, all his faith in momentum; the force tumbles them over the edge, because this is the rim of the crater in which they’d planted their city, this is the sharp brim that borders their hearts, or his hearts, at least. And with the Citadel a stronghold defeated from the inside, there’s nothing to keep the forcefields and antigravs in place, nothing to power the engines that safeguard its architecture.

Nothing to stop them falling.

Down, down, down, arms and heads and hips crashing into walls and outcroppings and infrastructural protrusions: the Master feels the bones crack with each impact, the liquids concuss in his body, the soft parts of him crying out, the hard parts roaring; he hopes the Doctor feels the same. He grins as he falls, and imagines her teeth meeting a pipe. He hears some brittle object shatter and imagines Gallifrey embedding itself in her body, writing itself onto her skin as it drags her into itself, into its depths.

Vision is nothing, a chaos; the orientation of axes are nothing; his spine is a nothing that is just pain and the anticipation of snapping. But, eventually, the steepness begins to even out. The precipice softens. In the end, the crater becomes a kind of cradle, a curve so gentle only Time Lord senses can tell it from level ground.

He breathes for a long time, watching the Doctor’s chest move up and down. 

He listens to the scratchiness, feels for the erratic rattle. He finds, to his surprise, that he can move. And if he can, then so can she. He drags himself to what could be called ‘up’. He positions himself over her, forcing his limbs to clear the height of her prone form. “Doctor,” he says. Spit escapes his mouth when he speaks, to land on her cheek, thick and speckled with blood. 

She blinks. Perturbed? She should be. 

She’s as slack and listless as a paper doll. She’s the sum of a stack of paper, folded and cut into endless faded outlines. Always borrowing someone else’s clothes, taking someone else’s place. 

Her shirt has rucked itself out of the waist of her trousers. And, ah—there it is—

“You did fall, before.” The Master hooks his fingers under the hem of the t-shirt and lifts it to reveal her stomach. “You stumbled. This is more than a cut.”

She grimaces. She curls her lip. “How do you know it didn’t just happen?”

“I could feel it.” He touches the glass embedded in her, half sunk in a puddle of light. “You picked out the piece in your hand, but these you left, you covered them up. Here are the dried stains in your shirt, alongside the fresh ones. Looks like old habits are catching up to you.”

“It was just until I caught up to _you_.”

“Why, because you wanted me to see?”

“Because I was in a rush. Because you...you did _this_! And you think it’s for some reason I would understand. You want to confront me about it. So, I came. Make up your mind. Do you want me to die, or do you want to talk?”

“I want…” 

He wants. He wants, as it turns out, something that never was. He wants to hurt her, so that they can be the same again, and he wants to see the evidence of this fellowship as searing and unmistakeable as the evidence of its insincerity. He wants her out of his body and he wants her to fill his body, and hollow it from that invasive within, and boil away once and for all with her fire the hated things inside him, and leave him as blank and shut as her face when she looks at him. He wants to be the silhouette of carbon left behind; he wants an entire silence, like that before the beginning of sound, the preparation before the breath before the words. And before the thought that there could be anything to scream about, anyone to mutter it. 

The Master’s eyelids flutter. 

He runs his palm over the glass, the matching palm to the one still bleeding on the Doctor’s hand, and makes himself a mark like hers. The cut discharges viscid liquid down the pane. Her stomach quivers; the drops splatter onto her skin. But the light absorbs it, as it subsumes everything. He disappears into her. They disappear into it. 

Then that's what they will do. 

He plucks the shard of glass from her stomach, leaving the light to well and fountain. She starts, she jerks, inhaling, with a sound like alarm, she tries to sit up, and before she can make him stop he pushes it, sharp corner first, far into himself, his belly a clay turning immediately into a molten thing and that thing a chain reaction that runs away with his entire body, flushing it with heat. 

Her eyes go very wide, and she does sit up, she flips them so that he is on his back and she’s pinning him with her weight on his legs, the impact lighting up every fracture in his being like cracks in the spine of existence, the irreparability of it the same pain as the one he can no longer abide— 

“Why? _Why_ ,” she’s shouting repeatedly into his face, frantic with the incomprehension, and he laughs.

“I didn’t think it mattered to you anymore,” he says in an undertone, searching for the haunted look in her eyes, which he can’t seem to find.

She snarls. “Why did you to this to our planet?” she clarifies. “Before you—I _don’t_ care what you do to yourself, you’re right about that, but—”

“It’s _not yours_ ,” he interrupts savagely, “you never even wanted it.”

“All right, fine, you love this place so much, with your birthright and your estates and your _views_ , what could make you go berserk on it, what would make you destroy it in this messy, sullying way, what would make you…”

She comes to a stop, runs out of words, helpless. The Master’s turned his face away, fixing on the dirt. 

It’s her turn. She reaches out. Touches the terrible light. Under it, the wounds he’s made are barely discernible. His flesh is an illusion, raw and red and ragged, the higher reality making a joke of it, so that he shudders when she touches him but what is the Master doesn’t move at all, held in place by her hand, waiting to burst from him. 

“Look at me when I’m talking to you.”

He curls into a sit-up, delirious agony, to get close to her. “Regenerate with me, and I’ll tell you.”

She shakes her head so immediately that it must be automatic. She hesitates in the magnetic paralysis of wanting to take that bad decision. The Master feels the smile lift his lips and makes certain to suppress it. It was too sweet, too full, likewise, of wanting.

“Come on,” he coaxes, dragging his hand up to the back of her neck and pulling her in, forehead to forehead, back in the wasteland. “Let’s see that beautiful self-destruction.”

She doesn’t have that kind of control anyway—but he does, and he loosens himself into it, like an explosive in air, like a great release of pressure underwater, like all the voices of the dead through the vestibule of his mind. He casts and casts and she’s caught up in it, reeling back, but she’s there already, because she’s always there, she’s always been there all along, and the thread of herself that she gave him calls to her, and if she could hear it, she would stretch out her hand for it, because to touch it would be to be whole, and that’s what he would die for, to be whole, and here, in the stream of their unbeing together he can see what that would be: like standing on the tower and the terrace all at once. Like tasting the land and the stars in accord on his tongue. Like not minding that she is first, a transport which once had almost been a possibility, a state of numinous abnegation, love, ecstatic relief.

The Doctor’s hidden wounds rise to him. Her hidden self lifts from the backing of her form, a film and he the fluid, in which the false idols will be seared away and the truth will be revealed. He takes her into himself, gathering strands of the past with bright and intangible hands. He takes her hurts into himself, where they become his wounds. 

Her arms wrap around him, surrounded in light, his head on her breast. Or he hurls himself upon her, chest to chest, shoulder to shoulder, gut to gut, two bodies in a stream dissolving, rust, chalk, quicklime, generating great heat, the immensity of which turns the ground around them to slag _into_ which they sink, into Gallifrey, into the land that he had tried so hard to destroy, the dirt he wanted so helplessly to efface, to erase the memory in the soil, to return the land to the planet’s core, the mountain to its hearts, in hopes that when it rose again it would be like the first day, when it was new. 

So much time has passed since then. So much laid down into his world, a lot of it by him, a lot against his will. That inlay is his ghosts, his lines of sediment that won't shut up. The crystals of it grow in him, piercing him in every direction. 

A glint, the glint before the blast, through a shattering window— 

She's stolen his nature from him and returned it corrupted into the world, shot through with the pain of repetition, separation. Hot shrapnel from the inside. Unendingness. She's made him alien to it, and it is a grief he's made up of, so much of it now that take it away and he would collapse into powder, salt after flood and after the drying after flood. The drying fire is the light and the salt is the light arising and dissolving and the destruction and the craving are the light and history is the light. Dying is the light. No, dying is the only thing that is not the light. 

They are together in the light; this is their looking back. This is consecrating their forms to the slaking of Gallifrey. 

But she pushes against him, as the Doctor has always done. The light falters, then goes dim, leaving the Master blind and blinking, every burning pillar a shadow. The Doctor’s backlit and the first thing he's able to see again. As he squints up at her, she stands, staggers, regains her balance, and pulls the remaining shards out of herself. She tosses the handful, disdainful, to the ground. The glass is nothing. The light is nothing. 

The only thing left is dust. If it shines, if it's sharp, it's only like everything else she has ever thrown down among the gravel of his life. 

“You’ll tell me eventually anyway. It wouldn't mean anything to you if you didn't.”

She's cruel, this Doctor. 

_Coward._

“I won’t do this with you. You didn't with me.”

The Master wipes wet grit from his mouth with a hand that's only just corporeal again. “A waste,” he manages to say. 

“Yes,” she replies, though she's not agreeing with him. 

She turns to study the long climb out to the surface. She sighs. 

It's a very, very small triumph. The Master takes his paltry pleasure in it and lets it sink into the pool of his need. 

She starts to move. He's still on the ground, littered there, the detritus of Gallifrey. Loose stone showers him as she climbs, shot-loud pinpoint impacts, fallout from the transit of her boots, red hail that stings his body and pricks his skin. He watches her as she pulls herself away: all the way up to the sky, and not once does he see her look back.


End file.
